5 simple SEO actions that are evergreen and give results

The term SEO or search engine optimization refers to actions taken to get a website a higher placement on search pages of Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc. A discovery by search engines and high placement on search pages leads to higher amount of traffic and consequent benefits. SEO is not strange to most bloggers' ears. However, it has been so jargonized and made to look difficult by the so-called SEO experts that the common blogger feels overwhelmed and feels that SEO is not his or her cup of tea.

Only those earning out of the blog or wanting a lot of traffic to the blog need to carry out high degree of SEO for their site - on their own or through SEO experts. Others need not go for an SEO service or be worried about SEO except to take some search optimization actions so that their blog/ website is not ignored by search engines despite good content.

In fact, the best SEO practices are usually those that are simple, natural and ethical. It is reported that many of the 'experts' are not real experts and have learnt a few tricks of the trade. They use these tricks to get short-term gains to the website/ web page. In the long term, the website/ blog does not gain much and is sometimes even hurt beyond repair. If you are interested in what Google says about the importance of right and natural search engine optimization, please visit the link given at the bottom of this article.

How to improve SEO in an ethical, natural way

The idea of ethical search optimization is to give signals to the search engines that your website/ blog and its individual posts have high value. Google says, when more people talk about it on their websites or social media, that is a good signal. People staying on the web page, clicking on the page link on search results and visiting other pages of the same website are some other strong signals. On the other hand, people quickly leaving the website and not visiting more than one page are weak search signals.

I am giving here five common-sense actions that non-techie bloggers can take and improve their blog's search rankings on Google (and on Bing and Yahoo!).

Is good content enough for search engine optimization?

No, it is not; but the quality of content is of prime importance. Write like an expert. Sometimes write big, well-researched, articles. Write such content regularly. That is a sure-shot guarantee that other SEO efforts will be more effective.

Give each post a relevant, catchy headline so that it is read when it comes in search results.

You can make the headline provocative, seek action, show urgency or offer help so that people are pulled towards it. However, do not hoodwink; if your headline promises something, the body of the post must deliver that.

Be focused on the subject, so that search engines discover your authority over it.

If you write on Himalayan glaciers, write many post on it, link with authoritative websites on the subject, interact on other blogs on the same subject. Focusing on the subject also helps in not straying too far from the main subject of the blog and thus developing the blog as a useful resource on the subject.

Socialize on the social media to be popular and also give positive signals for web search.

It leads to natural link building and sends positive vibes to search engines.

Don't forget to optimize content for search, but do it in a natural way.

Think of some terms that searchers in your area of activity use while searching on the web. For example, on the subject of digital art, people could be typing such keywords on their search box: digital art museum, digital art gallery, digital art wallpapers, digital art courses, what software is available for making digital art, digital art prices. If you have a blog on digital art, you would catch attention of searchers (and therefore of search engines) if your posts cater to these search intentions. To optimize your blog for these search terms (= keywords), you should ensure that the text and headline strongly relate to at least one of the search terms you identified.

I do care for SEO but it so happened that I imported posts from an earlier blog and the imported files got new URLs based on the title. I have let all such posts unoptimized but new posts have search-friendly URLs.Thanks for bringing this up.